For two weeks before the fateful football game, we had been putting together The Non-Vagina Monologues. Claudia and I had recruited her Drama Club friends to perform alongside our own Feminist Club members. Robbie Schmidt and I had negotiated his role moving props backstage in a black turtleneck after he almost passed out in the first read-through and refused to perform. Mary Kate and I had – according to the heavy compromise Father Vincent had coughed out of her – painfully cut every vagina out of The Vagina Monologues, and all the best curse words, too. And, for the past week, we had spent every afternoon after classes in McLaughlin Hall with the Save Your Heart army, figuring out the logistics of the event and making decisions about timing, lighting and props.

There was friction, to say the least. But Mary Kate had been there every step of the way – not only entirely rewriting the play with me and coming up with vaginal euphemisms ranging from ‘body’ and ‘private parts’ to ‘down below’ – which made it sound like you could find the clitoris on a globe somewhere around New Zealand – but playing peacemaker between me and Katie Casey, too.

But Mary Kate wasn’t here anymore; she was hiding her plastered nose back at the dorm, only leaving (with a scarf wrapped around her face) when she had to go to class. She wasn’t even coming to rehearsals. And now, at a rehearsal that had run so late we had all missed dinner, the friction was about to spark into a fire.

‘I just don’t know about Claudia being in that position onstage,’ Katie said.

‘That position,’ I informed her, ‘is for medical reasons. This isn’t Claudia doing a striptease.’ Again I looked over at Claudia doubtfully. ‘Probably. This is a medical procedure. People should know about pap smears and personal health.’

‘You’re totally right, Alex; I totally agree with you that health is important. I just don’t think this needs to be right out here onstage. The whole idea of Save Your Heart is saving some things – some special, personal things – just for ourselves.’

‘You mean hiding things and being ashamed of them,’ I shot back.

Claudia looked up from filming herself. ‘You know,’ she informed us, ‘I don’t even need the stirrups. I’m perfectly capable of spreading my legs for extended periods of time.’

That deserved some kind of joke, but I was not in the mood. Instead, I picked up the crutch again and told Katie Casey, ‘Either I get my stirrups, or this thing gets shoved up –’

‘Good evening, ladies and gentleman!’

I whirled around, crutch in hand, to see Father Hughes coming down the aisle, smiling calmly. Fantastic. What? Had Katie Casey secretly sent up the virgin signal? No, she didn’t need to. Father Hughes was our faculty advisor now. He could come waltzing in, in those doomsday priest shoes, anytime he wanted and take control.